Move down. Other versions.

Rationing or Revolution

On the climate front, we saw three trends emerge this summer:

1. Rising climate chaos with turbulent weather, deteriorating harvests, increase in unlivable zones, excessive warm seas;
2. The slowing energy transition due to political resistance, war spending, inflation, failing start-ups, temporised innovation;
3. The increasing insistence of climate intellectuals that tighter steering is needed.

I want to go into the last trend in depth here because it is an activism where, just like with street activism (of XR, Rising Tide, Letzte Generation, etc.), reflection won't hurt.

The rising climate chaos is making the position of intellectuals less and less enviable. They are very numerous because the partitioning between manual and main labour has been boosted considerably in recent decades because of the fact that the liberal handling of reserves (the right to accumulate capital) has spread worldwide. In doing so, we have ignited a mutual competition (on markets) in which having as many brainiacs available (because of their output of analyses and designs) is decisive for winning or losing. For example, between 2014 and 2018, the number of researchers grew three times faster than the world population. Most countries already count 40% highly educated people.

Their position is becoming less enviable now that we are sinking, because they form the bulk of both the high-emission upper class of the population and the responsible managerial elite, but have to watch helplessly as the implementation of proposed transition policies slows down and cannot possibly be accelerated. No surprise that especially the climate intellectuals among them – an increasingly large part of the total research population – have recently got more eager to get closer to the steering seat where the levers for course change are at arm's reach.

Last summer, intellectuals published two reports that presented long-term climate policy in a well-integrated manner in one depiction.

• This one at national level (NL): The advice for the climate plan 2025-2035, by The Netherlands Scientific Climate Council (WKR). See English summary here.
• This one at global level: A just world on a safe planet, by the Earth Commission (EC).

Two very serious reflections drawn up by groups of scientists who function in frameworks that have been configured in recent years to intertwine science more strongly with governance. Their mission boils down to working out mitigation issues in bite-sized chunks for governmental decision-makers and making them practicable for them.

Both reports plot a fairly linear emissions-reduction path to 2050, assuming there is still enough carbon budget until that date to construct the required infrastructure.

The reduction path of the WKR

What is special about the WKR is that, relying on the fact that ultimately 84% of emissions will be cut via ETS 1 (industry and electricity) and ETS 2 (road transport and buildings) – ETS is the EU Emissions Trading System – they propose an acceleration of reductions towards 2040, in order to then have room for tough nuts and setbacks until 2050.

Towards 2040, they advise achieving a 90-95% reduction (was 80). They stress that a continuous broad monitoring of the dynamics of all national societal variables (economic, social, spatial) must guide that reduction path in order not to let it derail through feedbacks and substitutions. A system approach therefore by integrating sub-plans and programmes, namely the Energy System Plan, the Rural Area Plan, the Circular Economy and Sustainability programmes, the Adaptation Strategy plan, and the Delta Water Programme. Finally, out of concerns about people's resistance (implementation), they want a lot of work to be done on developing promising perspectives (visions of the future) that appeal to all ranks of Dutch society. For instance, future visions for sub-transitions such as food, energy, and circular economy.

Their main reasoning, in my view, is:

• We use the emissions space still available in the coming decades to switch the energetic propulsion of all activities – not counting bunker emissions (air and shipping) and imported emissions, by the way – to renewables (solar, wind farms, nuclear, hydrogen) the maintenance, renewal, and dismantling of which we can now pretend to be emission-free after 2050.
• In the meantime, we also officially assume that we can get a lot of people's behaviour changed in that time-space, away from demand for emissions-rich productions (like meat, and travel) through peer influence and media and through vision interference by governments, and also actively pursue policies to make productions circular in order to minimise resource (including energy) extraction. Since we ourselves do not believe that those two tricks (behavioural change and circular change) will yield much result, after all, they have yielded nothing for 15 years – the radius of most production circles (like glass, carton, plastics) has gone worldwide (i.e. has evolved to the radius of the earth), and the demand for luxury and opulence, travel, games, communication, and over-rich food continue to increase continuously in all countries – we are now going to sow reassurance – i.e. install watertight bulkheads around our emission-mitigation plan – just to be on the safe side, by immediately setting up a new branch of industry that goes by the captivating name: CO2 removal. Hocus pocus; CO2, away with it!!

The reduction path of the EC

What is special about the Earth Commission's is that it relates the emissions-reduction pathway to the boundaries of other key ecological variables (life conditions/sources) in order to face the impossibilities (i.e. limits) of our future existence on Earth more holistically and to be able to plot the emissions pathway more safely. This expands on Kate Raworth's macroeconomic model. Her first article (2012) was already entitled: A Safe and Just Space for Humanity. Everyone probably is familiar with her doughnut, that apple slice with a hole, in which two circles approach each other. The inner circle indicates how much pressure on our sources (such as air, water, climate, biodiversity) is needed to give everyone adequate access to needs (such as food, housing, amenities), and the outer circle indicates the boundary where that pressure begins to fatally damage the sources. The trick is to keep the inner as far away from the outer as possible. A wide corridor is safer to live in than a narrow one.

In fact, this evaluation of possible futures on a global level – i.e. scanning boundaries – really started numerically with the Limits-to-Growth report (1972) that asked ‘Can we continually keep expanding production and consumption?’ The answer (no) was hard for many to swallow.. Kate broadened that assessment in 2017 by confronting 12 needs with 9 sources (ecological sources), and she also pointed out the implications (of these boundary demarcations) for steering at the global level: ‘It acts as a compass for human progress this century’.

What does the Earth Commission add to Kate's model?
Their report calculates in more detail the width of the corridor between the safe and just boundaries (= ESBs) for five main variables (sources): climate change, biosphere, freshwater, nutrients, aerosols and air pollution – see the exact values of those boundaries in panel 3 in their report. They calculate that corridor for two levels of ‘just’, i.e. level 1 = to have minimum access to key resources and services for water, food, energy, and infrastructure, and level 2 = the minimum resources required to enable escape from poverty.

They then draw some very clear and hard conclusions:

• Earth-system boundaries (ESB's) have already been transgressed in many domains.
• Just raising the minima to level 1 ((and leaving the others alone) will not work because "that will push expected global warming beyond the safe ESB, thereby making it impossible to identify a safe and just corridor for climate in a business-as-usual scenario".
• And so they call for radical decarbonisation efforts combined with re-distribution of resources. They then illustrate the depth of the transformations needed until 2050 with calculations of "the impact on the Earth system if all humans consumed resources at level 2 of minimum access and no more". (See also the results of Millward-Hopkins).

They then proceed by putting forward proposals on how to decompose such global-level boundaries (and the transformations required to stay within them) to subgoals for lower local levels of decision-making (as federations of states, countries, regions, cities, companies).

The WKR'ideas on how to steer all this

These are quite diffuse. On the one hand, when it comes to steering the achievement of the emission-reduction path it has rolled out, the WKR rather meekly accommodates itself to the weak regulative capacity of the Dutch authorities at every level. But she pulls a trick to partially overcome (patch up) that weak regulatability by placing much climate policy in the shoes of the free will of citizens and businesses. (I will return to this in a moment). On the other hand, she does assign those governments the ultimate responsibility for achieving the emission reduction path, and in their report (which often reads like a management textbook) she therefore constantly teaches them to finally really stick to long-term policy – with clichés such as A coordinated approach means: a government that makes agreements on cooperation between administrative layers to achieve goals.

What trick does it pull to pretend to present a coherent steering?
After a paternalistic style of government right after the second worldwar, liberal democracies have come to profess that a government should be more reserved in its interventions in areas where civil society should be considered as capable of taking more matters in hand and setting standards itself. Gradually, we have started to act more and more as if individual choices do not fall under government policy. As if we as individuals operate in a vacuum. But that is a misleading representation of matters in which we are presented as choice-free but are essentially chained i.e. subject to regulation. Let me explain this with examples.

This WKR-advice aims to achieve two things (a) maintain the current weak governance style, (b) make society emission-free at a fairly rapid pace. However, these two cannot be combined. The first basic attitude emerges strongest in that it does not let the national government prioritise the different types of human activity – after all, governments are not allowed to impose choices – but instead applies the cheese-slicing method (by squeezing emission rights) across all types. Everyone is allowed to continue to do everything, you know. Choosing (prioritizing) is left to everyone themselves. That individuality, that sector as it were, is what a weak government calls ‘behavioural change’. As if she is beyond that. As if it is not the main task of our collective demarcating of each other's behaviour (i.e. government task) is to keep each other sharply within the lines when we are dealing with life-threatening things such as booze, drugs, sex, tobacco, sewage, money, diseases, water drainage, the sea.

In that behavioural change sector, there is a lot to be gained, of course, because if people drive or fly less, it makes a big difference, and so the government does start handing out pokes there. Mainly soft pressure through communication. This constant pretending not to intervene in people's activity mix in connection with climate policy is because they are afraid people will get angry? No way, guys, two motives. First, climate policy is potentially dynamite because almost every aspect of our daily production and consumption behaviour generates emissions. Unlike tobacco, everything from everyone has to come in the pincer. The government is very afraid of that. Second, governments get their revenue from taxes on transactions and cash flows. So let those markets, shopping malls, roads, airports, construction sites, and industrial estates swarm and swell. Especially don't shout boo.

The fallacy in their gouvernance idea with regard to the emission-reduction path (i.e. both wanting to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds) – i.e. acting powerless by not prioritising – is most apparent when they start formulating recommendations on three key sub-transitions. Note: they introduce this as 'Towards a systems approach for three transitions (food, circular economy, energy). Well, nice systems approach. In the case of food, they call for more technology to curb emissions in agriculture, and come up with the platitude of more plant-based food, while the emission benefits of this are wafer-thin because transport, processing, storage and supplements are not sufficiently attributed to it, and animal emissions are greatly exaggerated by calculating via intensive livestock farming with imported animal feed and energy-guzzling stable-, feed- and manure- systems.
The food transition ends with the joke: "By making plant-based food the standard in (semi-) government buildings, a broad group of people can be encouraged to make more sustainable food choices."

Why are they missing an easy goal on an open net here? Why is there an emission zone here that is completely ripe to make clear choices, wide open to prioritise, and really make a system approach a reality?
Agriculture in the Netherlands is a completely linear chain that goes all over the world. It mainly produces products for elsewhere with inputs from Allah knows where. Should flowers and plants for the rich elites be dragged in from all over the world every day to be mixed, traded, packaged and sent to every flower shop on earth together with our own productions? Should milk powder, eggs, cheese and pork be sold worldwide? Should the Netherlands import and export so much concentrated feed?
Why does the WKR fail to score in that emissions-rich field of activity?
Why doesn't she strike out relentlessly here?

To me, as a farmer who has worked in fairly closed cycles for 33 years, what immediately strikes me about the WKR's gaze is its incredibly petty bourgeois view of the countryside. As if there is nothing between a zoo and preserved (untouched) nature. Because they pay no attention to precisely those few major Dutch profit models that will crash due to high costs if you (should) charge them for all their emissions (including bunker emissions from overseas transport) and slowly have to throttle their rights completely towards 2040: the flower and plant chain, the meat, egg and dairy chain, and the sugar beet chain. Each is eye-wateringly energy-hungry. While Zutphen and Arjen Lubach have recently loudly put into words the absurdity (in terms of emissions, toxins, and superfluity) of the flower chain, for example, and everyone has long known that the meat and dairy chain stands or falls with super cheap transport of feed from other parts of the world and of finished products to other parts of the world, the WKR pretends not to see them.

But also take a close look at the sugar chain in which many pesticides and artificial fertilisers are used. Eight million tonnes of beet (= 75% water) have to be grubbed up, loaded and transported over long distances, after which sugar production boils down to slicing, scalding, boiling, distilling and centrifuging in order to get rid of all that water and leave behind sugar. See how for six weeks a year an entire machinery and transport fleet has to be kept in top condition to do all those jobs. One absurdly energy-consuming operation for a product we don't need at all. Living without sugar is no problem at all. One will ingest enough and better integrated through vegetables, grains, fruits and dairy.

Now more generally: Why does the WKR, with its so-called ‘system approach’ to these transitions, not propose to make agriculture completely circular by having all Dutch farms switch to mixed farming with an emphasis on grain, fodder beet, nuts and vegetables, but including in each farm a portion of grassland (in crop rotation) for supplementary production of dairy, meat, and eggs also in order to be able to compost sufficient manure (with vegetable and local sewage waste) to provide the entire area with sufficient basic nutrients each year? If an obligation were added to this to limit the parcels to 2 ha and to surround them with 5-metre-wide wooded banks, such a fully mixed farm set-up would be a huge hitt in terms of biodiversity, in terms of production of local fuels (wood) and fodder (fodder beet and barley), in terms of locally available versatile food package, in terms of making artificial fertilisers and pesticides dispensable, in terms of methane emissions (no more intensive livestock farming, far fewer dairy cattle), in terms of climate-resilience, and in terms of water management.

Such an integrated policy in the food-energy-circularity approach could really bear the label of a system approach, and credibly shore up a steep emission-reduction path. But then the Dutch government would have to come out of the closet in terms of steering – i.e. abandon its reluctant stance – and very clearly prioritise types of human activities. What comes first, and what can no longer be done for the time being. This WKR advice to the Dutch government is an example of letting pace and content depend on the political regulatability at the moment, instead of letting it depend on the actual control problems (urgency and scale). However, there is no time left for such a soft hand, for seducing and enticing. There is fire, a state of emergency. So apply other steering. I will come back to this later.

The EC's ideas on how to steer all this

On steering (gouvernance), they set the bar extreme high. Consider how they present themselves: ‘The Earth Commission is an international, transdisciplinary group of scholars that informs the creation of science-based targets and transformations to protect critical global commons"’. This commission is hosted by Future Earth, the scientific wing of the Global Commons Alliance. This address card makes it clear in one go that they are putting themselves in the position of world administrator, and from that position try to figure out what strategic choices are necessary to safely navigate the future. Their text refers quite often to scholarship and scholars (‘Scholars emphasise...’). As if that is the only source from which truth and value can be drawn. Their self-importance is unshakeable.

Who is funding the Global Commons Alliance? Mainly the Rockefeller Philanthropy, and the Foundations of Moore (Intel), Oak (Duty-free shops), Herlin (Elevators), Hewlett (HP), Porticus (C&A), Global Challenges (Stock market traders), and Generation Foundation (JustClimate Fund). A close partner of Global Commons Alliance with a similarly grandstanding name is the World Resource Institute (1900 staff members), and there Bezos Earth Fund is the main financier. This funding also shows the floating nature of the Earth Commission in higher spheres. After all, it's nowhere connected to a formal decision-making authority. And such authority does not exist at the global level either. Sure, you can fantasise those non-existent decision points by means of a conception of gouvernance that assumes a hierarchy with a top-down command line but unfortunately the strategic choices you then figure out – funded by super-rich parties worried about their investments – can't be made anywhere. By the way: the Limits-to-Growth project (1975) was also fully funded by a Foundation namely that of Volkswagen.

They do contradict this non-existence (of high-level decision power) with ‘The UN can set shared societal goals and coordinate global policy responses and international agreements, which national governments can then implement.’  But how worthless the UN's decision-making operates, and how lame and impotent their relationship to all particpating countries works out, we see demonstrated daily in current conflict situations. And even if that decision point were to function, the one below it (the national or interstate such as the EU or USA) is also not exactly in top form to both decompose strict goals and transformations to lower decision points (regions, cities, sectors, municipalities) and implement it through sharp control – see the governmental impotence that the WKR is trying to patch up via ‘behavioural change’.

Again, all those governments are adjusters (i.e. more fixers and referees than driver) of the dealings and distributive processes (= the competitive struggle for cake and influence) between their citizens. And those governments are themselves divided in the sense that the mandates of politicians depend (via elections) on the national battle of ideas on the scope and legitimacy of their intervening role. That is consequence of democracy. So our governments are weak: more broom wagons than steerers. Most steering in our societies is done by all those who own/manage reserves and make choices via investments and then push through. And these people are always worried about where and what they can invest in order to perpetuate that power. Money is at the wheel. That's where the power is.

However, EC's assumption of sufficient regulatability at the global and governmental level to be able to effectuate a tight planning of a reduction path is not the only flaw in their conception of how to steer this. The second major flaw is their amateurish vision of what should happen in those decision points. They consistently denote this with the soft term ‘cross-scale translation’ - ‘cross-scale translation of a global budget goes through the country or supranational territory, from where the country's budget is further distributed to sectors within the territory and then to businesses within each sector’ - but in essence, decomposing a common goal at a higher decision point into sub-goals for decision points below it involves the core operation of organizing people (= producing cooperation) i.e. figuring out how to dance together (interact, complement each other, take on sub-tasks). It is called coordination and is about identifying what one takes on and what the other takes on and how that fits into each other. An extremely delicate process because it revolves around allocations (tasks, resources), obligations that one takes on, and building mutual trust in the standards that the other generally adheres to. See how difficult it is in a relationship to smoothly run a household together, or to decide together how to make love and how often. In short: that ‘cross-scale translation’ of theirs is potentially a sweaty confrontation between parties in which moments of negotiation, challenge, coercion, hurt, and surrender alternate in rapid succession, and you have to analyse and organise that scene much more deeply than they do if you want to project firm regulatability and tighter planning onto it.

Now this last shortcoming of their control idea has not entirely escaped the drafters of this report. The more detailed they go into elaborating their boundaries and necessary transformations to lower decision levels further on in their report, the lower their tone on how their global ESBs should be interpreted, and finally decide to call it more of a road-map than a world plan: "The safe and just earth system boundaries is a roadmap for cities, businesses, and other actors to course correct human activities to a safe and just operating space. It's science for guiding action."

Insights

What do these reports – i.e. this climate activism – mean for insights as to how the bear could be shot?

• The good thing about both reports is that they advocate/claim very tight planning over a long period of time, as well as face up to the fact that radical transformations are needed in our socio-economic ways (morals/ manners) of giving each other access to necessities of life. This has to become more equal, both in terms of sharing yields and of participating in decision-making processes on strategy and implementation. Without that more equal directionality and stance, the deep transitions planned in all activity types become unfeasible. Everyone must be able to jump the hurdles, and all of them quite simultaneously. Otherwise one or more transitions will fail and then strict, meticulous, long-term planning will fall apart. It is remarkable, however, that both reports use big words like ‘transformations’ and ‘redistribution’ but don't give them much shape. Only in the case of rewilding (to meet the biosphere-boundary) they give sufficient elaboration. Neither income and property generation, nor the globalisation of productions, nor large-scale agriculture, industry and communications enter the firing line. EC briefly brings up degrowth but does not address it.
• Fragile features of both reports is carbon budget on the one hand, and their unrealistic ideas on how all this could be steered and managed. Regarding the latter: Both reports completely overestimate the realisability of the long-term mega-planning job they elaborate. But first, let's take a closer look at the unsteadiness of the carbon budget.
• On carbon budget.
  According to a recent estimate, we can emit 250 gigatons of CO2 or 6 years of emissions at current level starting from January 2023, for having a 50% chance to stay below 1.5 degrees.
  So the big question: Is there still so much budget – depending on where you are counting from (2020 or 2030) it is estimated to be between 500 and 200 gigatonnes of C02-eq, while we are currently emitting 40 gigatonnes per year – that their emission reduction pathways can still be safely completed over such a long period?
  In my opinion, no. The carbon budget has no substantial body anymore. It's gone. We are already past the 1.5°C rise. The situation is serious. There is clearly an acceleration (of climate change) going on at the edge of erupting life-threatening positive (= amplifying) feedback loops (like this one), and it does not stop here. Meanwhile, emissions continue to rise solidly. Nobody from the underclass can cut emissions, and nobody from the upperclass wants to surrender a slice of lifestyle. Masses of millionaires a year settle in Dubai, for instance. And all their boyfriends visit them weekly. In contrast, the cries of despair from all corners are getting louder and more numerous. See also crunch time for real. Or the Emissions Gap Report. Or Jonathan Watts summary of the climate situation.
  Humanity is teetering on the edge of a fatal abyss. There is only one absolutely safe way left to get away from it, namely drastically minimizing emissions by having everyone switch to a basic lifestyle. So: completely kill unnecessary emissions, and convert all agricultural and craft activities around residential areas to production of basic necessities. That is the only safe way forward. Why?
  There is still vitality in nature (i.e. growing vigour) now. Trees and plants are still functioning and the sea is not yet boiling. So we can keep humanity as a whole alive with the agricultural tools and machinery and household equipment that we have (and that can still last for decades to come). So there are no impediments to providing everyone's basic necessities of life so that we maintain good health, and thus decisiveness → optimism → cooperation. One more step further with this bulk emissions, and we get more and fast consecutive mega-disruptions to face,, with the result that we will lose the growth power of our best soil areas (the clay and silt areas in the global deltas; see here the recent expansion of dryland) for centuries and centuries. Hunger → Quarrel → War → Headhunting. In that order.
• On steering.
  The precariousness of the climate problem lies in the fact that we have letting it get so far out of control that very drastic cuts must now be made in the size and composition of emission-rich consumption (and hence production) of members of society. This implies that we all have to have almost all our behaviour (our interactions with each other) tightly monitored and regulated for decades i.e. a narrowly drawn emission-reduction plan is going to bother and burden every aspect of our daily production and consumption behaviour. That is the only way to still descend in time to an emission level where a 1° C increase (= safe and just boundary according to EC) stabilises. That steep downward path (that reduction path) must also be implemented very stringently because we can no longer afford to fall back a year.
  This raises two questions: (a) Can a democracy determine such a steeply descending path? (b) Can a democracy get such a steeply descending path implemented?
• On the determination of such a tight plan:
  Something may be determined or proposed initially (with a small majority), but credible implementation would then immediately require swallowing an authoritarian plan system (tight long-term steering). A democracy – because it is a mutual defence system between rivalling positions – will never allow the latter. Or thwart and reverse the deal in no time (via emerging party programmes), and gone is the downward path. See the reality around us. We are good at fixing something afterwards (feedback), and lousy at preventing something together (feedforward). After every climate measure (such as fuel and road pricing), we have backtracked. All that backing down – see Ryan's evaluation of the recent backlash in Ireland for example – is also exactly why climate is now presenting us with a fait accompli. We roll up our sleeves too late because together we are good at cleaning up messes but very bad at preventing them from being made.
  In liberal democracies, most control takes place through market players competing with each other. Weak governments (unstable, reluctant) ain't leading but repair and adjust what goes wrong. Our governments have limited powers and therefore limited regulatability. They respect (and protect) so many freedoms vis-à-vis members of society that everyone can continuously challenge decisions and compromises, even if it is in the last resort via voting, which puts everything back out of sight. Amen. This is wanting to win a grand prix with a pedal go-kart. Tight steering (see chapter 9 of this book, and Ostrom's book Governing the Commons) requires much more coherent steering (connected decision-making bodies) than via investors and repairing governments, and very different design (interconnectivity) of the causal processes to be governed.
• On the implementation of such a tight plan:
  When there is a great diversity of positions within the population because everyone contributes in a specialized way to the linked (parallel, serial, hierarchical) production of services and goods – and is thus unequally rewarded and unequally involved – defining (determining) and implementing a safe and fair steeply decreasing reduction path is a mega-job for which you have to maintain a very heavy regulatory system (masses of researchers, decision-making bodies, civil servants, and large judicial apparatus). How do you get that managed? Only through hierarchy, and therefore even more authority. That exacerbates the straitjacket that more and heavier planning activity in administrative processes so wie so already causes.... Because when preserving all globally connected processes, and all interactions between economies via trade and transport, more and tighter planning within the administrative system to every position in the system to be governed imposes (+ monitored/controlled) just about all the do's and don't's. As a result, people then have to function in a straitjacket of coordinating (squeezing) commands (in terms of the scope and timing and organisation of their productions) and controls. People don't want to live like that. It generates masses of dissidents, and many relocating companies.
• Is tight steering and democracy really an impossible combination?
  It depends largely on the nature of the beast (i.e. the causal stratum) to be governed. The more complex (i.e. many interactions between subsystems) that stratum is put together, and the more divergent the participants are positioned there, the more impossible tight steering becomes. Why? The complexity increases the extent to which planning has to take everyone in the pincer and impose choices, and the disunity of interests and visions arising from different positions (specialisation and inequality) in the stratum deteriorates the chances and ease of getting a plan (i.e. the long-term choices) around that is swallowed by all as fair and acceptable and can hold up during implementation. Our high-tech, specialised, meritocratic societies score high on both factors (complexity and divisiveness). So, no not to be combined.

But if tight steering is not possible, and there is no budget to take a long reduction path, what is left for us? Are there any options left?

What is still possible?

The first possibility:
One option for steep reduction that can still be done is to democratically decide to declare a state of emergency, and in that state then implement stringent rationing of basic necessities, the same for everyone, and at the same time seal off any other access outside the distribution channel. This is achievable, and has been successfully applied even under much less severe circumstances (such as occupations, epidemics). Even four years after the war (in 1949), my mother still received a ration card for textiles because of my birth, and without the right to rebuild (due to bombing) no one was allowed to build a house in those days. A very important additional advantage of this solution is that simultaneously with the greatly curtailed consumption of everything that is superfluous,, the (to be gouverned) causal stratum becomes much simpler and more surveyable. Why? International connections (inputs and outputs) become nil, and if one then also, in order to economise energy, produces the basic necessities of life (food, energy, housing, entertainment) locally as much as possible, the interactions within the country also become so calm and minimal that tight coordination (steering) can continue to be carried out democratically.

The second solution out of this impasse is a revolution with the aim of organising a sufficiently emission-free way of life for the entire population, and breaking the resistance against it. This solution, too, is achievable. It just has a more chaotic trajectory as switching to rationing. If rationing is not decided upon soon (via a state of emergency), concrete climate damage (disasters) and future expectations of inescapable human suffering will start to cause so much anger and hatred in circles that do not intend to let themselves be eradicated by obstinate emission fanatics that more and more violent outbursts/confrontations, accompanied by a war of words of reproaches and threats, will end up in a revolutionary power struggle.

Conclusion

In my view, the two studies in question are both comprehensive – i.e. they cover all the nooks and crannies of emissions reduction – and courageous because both dare to conclude that the system needs a pretty deep overhaul. But they do not take the bull by the horns (as Meadway does). They do not penetrate to the fact that a consequence of any assertion that apportioning has to be more equal and that not everything can be done anymore is that you will have to prioritise in which area you are going to dim the bigwigs (i.e. the consumers with a high level of non-essential spending). So prioritise and choose so that you can give direction (i.e. content) to your transformations. Now everything remains up in the air. Yes, they put some critical issues in the line of fire. But they don't dare point a gun at them. Open goal opportunities are not being taken advantage of.

Jac Nijssen, 2024
This article has been written November 2024, revised December.
A Dutch version was published on duurzaamnieuws.nl at 19 November 2024
French version here available.